Stories

Once, he’d had a long conversation with a girl who was an Evangelical. Evangelicals are the sorts of people who give religious folk a bad name was his general opinion. And yet, this girl had been smart, genuine, funny, even self-deprecating. “When you accept Jesus into your heart you see that the life you’ve been living, have lived, has been empty.” And he sipped his coffee and told her point blank that he, if he really believed her, was now jealous of her for finding some meaning in her life, that as he conceived it, life was empty for everyone, and that we were all trying to find ways to fill up that empty glass. She wasn’t really listening though, and he could tell.

                “I’m going to tell you something,” she said, leaning confidentially over her cup and revealing a pronounced bit of clavicle rising from beneath her skin like a dorsal fin. “I was twenty at the time,” she said, looking off into the distance, out the window, but not really looking out the window, but looking inward, he could tell, as people sometimes do in these sort of revelatory moments. Looking outward to look inward. That was at least the start of something quasi-religious, he thought.

                Some friends and I had gone to a party on the upper east side of my small college town. Everyone in this town partied on Friday and Saturday nights, because there was virtually nothing else to do. It had one movie theater, but it was the sort of movie theater that only showed popular films a two screener that specialized in high budget films that your average film student could probably deconstruct in about ten minutes time. The college was small enough, six hundred students or so, that it had little impact on the community. It wasn’t, as many people think of it, a college town, but rather, a college that happened to be in a town.

                This house had a long copse of cypress trees that lined the driveway that I remember watching out the window as we pulled into the driveway. I remember being struck by how beautiful the trees were, wet and stripped by a light evening rain. I tried to tell my friends who were sitting in the back seat with me to look out their windows at how beautiful the trees were, but I couldn’t get the words out to describe it. They fell short, or so I thought.

                This all happened a short enough time ago that I can remember nearly every detail. The house had an in ground swimming pool, which people were jumping into from off the roof. The pool was lit by one of those underground lights that suffuses it in such a way that it looks like the shape of an unformed dream. The girl was getting comfortable now, he could tell, warming to her story, she had her hands wrapped around her coffee mug and was staring at the center of the table, but he could tell that she wasn’t there at all, that she’d gone back, time traveled back to this night, what, two three years ago by the look of her when something had happened, and this intrigued him a great deal, this type of time travel, to a moment in someone’s life that they could point to as seminal. He had no seminal moments in his life, just a collection of remembrances that when pieced together formed a sort of meaningless collage, not a life, not a structured thing with points along a line, no vertex or right angles, just points on a graph that signified nothing.

                We’d had a long conversation that night about who each of us would like to sleep with. You’ll forgive me for saying this. I was a completely different person, wholly unrelated to the person who sits before you now. She made eye contact as she said this, assuring him that it was true. She took a sip of her tea before continuing. “Anyhow, the girls and I had had this conversation ahead of time, and we’d kind of staked out our own particular leanings, made sure they didn’t overlap and set about to find them, these guys. And I shouldn’t have to tell you that we found them, found these guys and told them a couple of stories and that each one of us was on her way to being successful in her own way, because it isn’t all that hard to be successful in that sort of endeavor. It’s one of the rubs, one of the clues that it was meaningless, that it wasn’t challenging, that in and of itself it was just another thing to do, like waking up in the morning, or showering, or washing our hair.